"RAN AWAY."

So began a score of advertisements every week in the New Orleans newspapers, advertising for slaves who'd fled their masters.

But the Turk, Hüseyin Pasha, posted no such advertisement when his two lovely concubines disappeared. And when a witness proclaimed that he'd seen the "devilish Infidel" hurl the two girls' dead bodies from his attic window on Bourbon Street, everyone in New Orleans "knew" of the proverbial jealousy of Turks and was willing to believe him the murderer.

Only Benjamin January, driven by memories of his first meeting with the Turk in Paris ten years before, is willing to brave public outrage and mob violence to seek for the true culprit.

The quest takes him back to memories of tragedy, and, in pursuing them, he finds himself the target of accusations which endanger his family, his freedom . . . and his life.